Birth of the Federation: Deadlocked

LordShaithis · Post by **LordShaithis** » 2005-11-20 04:18am

Anyone have any advice or general input?

I'm playing Birth of the Federation as the Cardassian Union, with the difficulty set to Impossible. (Quite by accident, but I was already deep into the game and doing pretty well by the time I noticed.) The only other empires remaining are the Federation and the Ferengi, and I'm allied with both. The Klingons were taken down fairly early by the Federation, with a little help from yours truly. (After my initial invasion of Qo'nos was repulsed, I reacted by wiping out the entire system. Muahaha.) I smashed the Romulans myself, with my "helpful" Ferengi allies managing to grab only a few unimportant colonies.

Technically I can declare a co-operative victory whenever I like, but we all know co-operation sucks. The problem is, everyone loves each other. Each remaining empire has steadfastly refused my war pact proposals, and attacking one will likely draw the other in against me relatively quickly. They're too strong to fight simultaneously, and their internal security is too good for me to split them up via framing them for sabotage.

The Ferengi are by far the more dangerous of the two. They're nearly as large as I am, and the intel screen tells me they have an advantage in military strength. My heavy cruisers are superior pound-for-pound, but they have a lot of smaller ships. The Federation is maybe one-third smaller and proportionately weaker, still powerful enough to require considerable effort to overcome.

I'm really at a bit of a loss. The only idea I've come up with thus far is to maybe bliztkrieg the Federation, slagging key systems without slowing down to occupy them, and hopefully crippling them before the Ferengi enter the war. At that point I would ignore the Federation and try to slog through the zergfest of crappy Ferengi cruisers.

My plan will be to leave half my fleet on the border to intercept invaders, while bunching the other half into a single massive death-squad. It won't intentionally seek out the enemy fleet, and it won't hobble itself by dragging around slow-ass troop transports. It'll go right for every star system capable of producing dilithium, and pound them into dust. If I can get them all, the enemy will be unable to build new ships, at which point I can just attrit my way to victory.

I've never played on this difficulty before though, and I'm not sure what to expect. The Federation did most of the fighting against the Klingons, and I had the Romulans badly outclassed by the time I hit them, so I'm not too familiar with the AI strategy at this level.

LordShaithis · Post by **LordShaithis** » 2005-11-20 06:32am

"Deadlocked" now refers to my computer, as a game in which two dozen starships represents a considerable force tries to process a battle involving roughly 250. Ow.

Ubiquitous · Post by **Ubiquitous** » 2005-11-20 12:28pm

To be honest I found the 'Impossible' setting to be quite easy. I never remember getting beat by the AI in BOTF after my first few goes.

Ah the memories...

The Guid · Post by **The Guid** » 2005-11-20 02:50pm

If you wait for random events that might help to soften up an opponent...

Bertie Wooster · Post by **Bertie Wooster** » 2005-11-20 04:36pm

I'd actually attack the Ferengi, head on. My recollection is the the fleet-strength meter over-estimated them and even when they were rated with the largest milirary, they always had a high-number of crap ship and unused troop transports.

Save your game, declare war on them, attack them with a sizeable part of you total fleet, and in the big battle see if you're not able to beat their armada. It should be only 4 turns. I think, you'll be surprised how easily you can defeat their superior numbers, especially if your ships have veteran or better crew ratings.

LordShaithis · Post by **LordShaithis** » 2005-11-20 04:47pm

Their main fleet is all bunched up in one place, and consists of a little over 40 ships of cruiser-grade or better, plus well over 100 scouts and destroyers. My fleet consists of 7 squadrons of 8 heavy cruisers each, for a total of 56 ships. That's all I can build without exceeding my support rating and cutting into my income.

Bertie Wooster · Post by **Bertie Wooster** » 2005-11-20 05:12pm

Yeah, I'd send all your ships in, and on the first round have 2/3 of your ships target their cruisers, and the rest target the smaller ships. Cardies have the best hulls of all the races, so you may be able to wipe out their fleet with only minor losses.

LordShaithis · Post by **LordShaithis** » 2005-11-20 05:38pm

I'll have to auto-resolve or something. My CPU doesn't like having to render the majority of a fully developed galaxy's military all fighting it out at once.

EDIT: Yeah, their main fleet is now 51 command, 121 fast attack, and 27 strike. All from an empire a bit smaller than mine. Something's out of whack.

namdoolb · Post by **namdoolb** » 2005-11-20 08:49pm

not too far out of whack, they're probably subsidising that fleet out of their income. (which they can afford to do because being ferengi they probably have a monstrous income anyway).

I'd think about sabotaging their economic capacity: take their money away from them and they'll have problems running a fleet that size.

I'd also think about expanding your fleet a little (not too much) and diversifying a little too. If I recall correctly, Destroyer II's make excellent punching bags for the enemy fleet. They almost always take the first hits, and have respectable enough survivability if you order them to evade and they have a decent crew rating. A few of those in the fleet could spare you the loss of the much more expensive Heavy cruisers.

(I know that you'd have to run the battle yourself instead of auto-resolving in order to make that work. But to be honest the auto-resolve probably won't calculate in your favour even in a straight fight.... with those kind of numbers against you, I'd be very afraid not to take the helm myself.)

LordShaithis · Post by **LordShaithis** » 2005-11-20 11:02pm

I'm taking the co-operative win, and never playing this combination of difficulty and map size again. Gobbling up a third of the galaxy, turning it's entire production toward building zillions of little destroyers, then running them around in one huge CPU-raping swarm just isn't a fun tactic to play against. We're talking 2 or 3 minutes to resolve strategic turns, and literally twice that to resolve individual combat rounds. I spend more time staring at the screen while it works than I do playing.

LordShaithis · Post by **LordShaithis** » 2005-11-21 04:46am

You know, playing mostly as the Cardassians, it seems certain patterns emerge across games. The Klingons and Romulans always seem to go down, while the Federation and Ferengi become powers.

The Klingons inevitably RAWR and try to fight everyone, usually getting their shit ruined the first time they meet anyone that outguns them. In my new game, they sucked up to me until I turned down their offer of a full alliance. Then they got all uppity and declared war not long thereafter, at which point I blitzed Qo'nos. The Federation has jumped in on them too, and they won't last much longer.

The Romulans just fail to make friends, and get pummeled by some combination of the others. In my previous game they remained neutral to everyone, until I decided to go after them. I was free to go apeshit with sabotage and orbital bombardment, since nobody gave enough of a shit about them to complain.

Bertie Wooster · Post by **Bertie Wooster** » 2005-11-21 09:21am

I noticed the the Feds and Ferengi get played the best by the computer with the Cardassians sometimes being dominant. The Romulans always suck, although they're the best race to play as. The Romulans also have the best chance to fight the borg, since they only need 7 warbirds or Battlecruisers to destroy a cube in a battle.

LordShaithis · Post by **LordShaithis** » 2005-11-21 05:47pm

In my games as the Federation, the Cardassians usually end up a third-rate power that constantly tries to spy on me. Eventually they declare war, and if I don't feel like taking the morale hit for an invasion, I just park a fast squadron in their richest cluster of systems and raid away all their money.

Speaking of the Federation, I really wish their were a mod to de-wank the Defiant. As it is, once you can build it, it's the last warship you'll ever need. I much prefer the Constellation, which is both better looking and more fun to play. It's fast and reasonably well-armed, but it's no battleship. To employ it offensively, you have to pay close attention and put that speed to good use.

Bertie Wooster · Post by **Bertie Wooster** » 2005-11-21 05:51pm

The problem is when you play against the Federation, they only make the crap ships like the Light Cruiser, Galaxy, and don't ever make the defiant.

LordShaithis · Post by **LordShaithis** » 2005-11-21 07:48pm

The AI does love those crappy Ambassadors, doesn't it? It will eventually start building the Galaxy-X in numbers, but that brings up another annoying quirk. The Galaxy is classed as a battleship, yet the Galaxy-X is only a heavy cruiser. Huh?

They really should have chosen a different ship for that role. I'd have loved to have seen the Excelsior in the light cruiser slot, with the Ambassador bumped up to heavy cruiser.

namdoolb · Post by **namdoolb** » 2005-11-21 08:04pm

Bertie Wooster wrote:The problem is when you play against the Federation, they only make the crap ships like the Light Cruiser, Galaxy, and don't ever make the defiant.

The other problem with the defiant is that you never get to use it properly, 'cause no matter how many ships they have the ai always seems to run at the first sight of it.... well, except for the random alien encounters, but the rather cheesy nature of their weapons means you're better off employing a group of strike cruisers screened by destroyers or heavy destroyers against them anyway. it's only human players that aren't scared shitless of the defiant and will actualy fight it.

LordShaithis · Post by **LordShaithis** » 2005-11-21 10:57pm

What sort of setup do you guys use for your fleet? Like what's your proportion of destroyers to cruisers/battleships? I tend to be pretty... straightforward. Lots and lots of heavy cruisers. When in battle, I throw everything straight at the enemy's biggest ships and work my way downwards. When dealing with enemy star systems, I typically capture a handful of them (their capital, minor race worlds, etc.) and just BDZ the rest. No need to dick around with pacifying every stupid little Klingon colony in the universe.

LordShaithis · Post by **LordShaithis** » 2005-11-22 05:54am

Addendum: I've always played with random events off. Now that they're on... do they do ANYTHING besides randomly turn planets barren? Jesus Christ. Every ten or fifteen turns. At this rate the entire universe will be barren planets.

Ubiquitous · Post by **Ubiquitous** » 2005-11-22 06:29am

I seem to remember employing swarms of Constellations and putting them into 'evade' mode. The enemy finds it very hard to hit them and you pick up the enemy at will.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2005-11-22 06:34am

LordShaithis wrote:Addendum: I've always played with random events off. Now that they're on... do they do ANYTHING besides randomly turn planets barren? Jesus Christ. Every ten or fifteen turns. At this rate the entire universe will be barren planets.

Wait for the mega-death Borg Cubes to show up and leave a trail of destruction.

GuppyShark · Post by **GuppyShark** » 2005-11-22 07:28am

I played this game once.

A few turns into the game, the Crystal lifeform thing wiped me out.

Uninstall, return to store.

Post by **Vympel** » 2005-11-22 08:09am

LordShaithis wrote:Addendum: I've always played with random events off. Now that they're on... do they do ANYTHING besides randomly turn planets barren? Jesus Christ. Every ten or fifteen turns. At this rate the entire universe will be barren planets.

Sounds like SW: Rebellion's annoying natural disaster bullshit. By the end of an average game you'd have a dozen or so important planets reduced to pieces of useless rock because of natural disasters that wipe out their resources, and for some bloody reason, the amount of spaces they have for improvments. Sucked.

Bertie Wooster · Post by **Bertie Wooster** » 2005-11-22 09:42am

The great thing about the Cardassian heavy cruisers and battleships is that their hulls were so strong, that they could be used to ram enemy ship and still survive the battle.

Malfeas · Post by **Malfeas** » 2005-11-22 09:58am

It's been a few years since I've played the game, but I have many fond memories of it. I wish a quality sequel would be made.

Cardassians were one of my favorite races to play. One of the advantages of the cardassians was that the larger your fleet, the better they fought. For this reason alone they are better at mid to late game timeframes. I suggest grouping all or most of your heavy cruisers into one fleet and finding the largest Ferengi fleet and engage it. A heavy cruiser fleet of 40 to 60 ships is almost unstoppable, the Ferengi fleet is probably well diversified, and at a significant disadvantage on heavy ships.

First move to close range and target their cruisers; like Klingons, Cardassians ships fight better at close range due to their reliance on phasers as their main weapon. Romulans and Ferengi rely on torpedoes, and prefer long range bombardments, the Federation is evenly balanced. Their lighter ships will then spend the next turn trying to increase their distance from you in order to use their torpedoes, bringing little firepower to bear. By that time you will have eliminated the heavy ships and will easily defeat the destroyers. Also you can bring along a small detachment of sacrificial destroyers and set them on evade, the AI tends to fire on the smaller ships first, this will help you close the distance.

As long as you have at least 24 ships in a cardassian fleet, you can usually defeat fleets twice your size if you use the right tactics. But then again, that can apply to all the races, especially the Klingons and Romulans with their cloaking advantage.

Also another strategy as the Cardassians is to take advantage of their manufacturing boosting abilities and buy a technological lead over your enemies. Simply concentrate on several planets with large populations and only concentrate on manufacturing. What you want is the ability to build your largest ship in two to three turns. Then you can sell the extra ships you produce and use the money to buy upgrades on your other planets. If this is done right, you will accelerate your tech progress far beyond anything your opponents can do. Often times I would reach tech level 9 before anyone else made it to level 6 or 7, and this was against human opponents as well as the AI.

Post by **Vympel** » 2005-11-22 10:29am

Didn't this game have a severe memory leak problem? Never could find a copy unfortunately. Pity, since it's like MOO but Star Trek, IIRC?